A guide: converting Blu-Ray to MKV

I am new to the forum but I thought I'd start with a little advice which may help some of you gain a little knowledge on how to get content from a Blu-ray to your Live Hub / Plus / whatever you have

I have written an article at the link below, complete with screenshots, which may help you. I have copied a lot of content with these settings and never had a problem.

This will give you great quality video, a small file size, digital surround audio (DD/DTS) as well as chapters and subtitles (especially for those pesky non-english parts you find in movies *pointing at you, Avatar*)

Re: A guide: converting Blu-Ray to MKV

All that work is a waste of time. PavTube's ByteCopy will convert BD discs to MKV without any picture quality loss and while preserving the original multi-channel audio and is literally one-click easy. No additional codecs required, either.

Re: A guide: converting Blu-Ray to MKV

First of all, Pavtube is not free software, it is something you pay for, and when there are tools available to do these things for free, can make all the difference. Also, the purpose of this is for compression, too. Not everyone has the storage to store 1:1 rips. Other things to note:

- Pavtube may have the ability to crack the protection within some Blu-ray discs however there are some releases it struggles with, especially by certain studios.

- Pavtube gives you very little customisation and flexibility. You don't get anywhere near as many options -- if you want to make 1:1 copies, thats great, but if you want to compress, the quality is bad.

- Pavtube is unethical - they mostly use spam to advertise their products. By purchasing the product you encourage spam much more in general by this company. [1]

- Pavtube has issues extracting some audio cores from certain releases, which means playing back may be impossible on the WD TV Live Hub as it doesn't support DTS Master on passthrough (and only passed through LPCM at stereo)

- Pavtube also has very little in the way of updates. You may find that some releases aren't even recognised.

People know already that 1:1 rips causes issues with the Live hub. No DTS MA/TrueHD support and lack of support for PGS subtitles, therefore, you may find that movies with foreign parts do not display subtitles as they should and you may not even get any audio. By using the tools I suggested you can be sure as to what you want without being subject to such a basic interface whereby it causes the media to not even play back correctly.

Also, a few issues with MakeMKV:

- MakeMKV takes a lot of time to encode, so unless you rip the content of the discs to the machine first then encode them, it is a case of ripping straight from the Blu-ray, which is bad, because it means the drive is locked and in use in the mean time. If something goes wrong along the way, you have to start all from the beginning, whereas if you copy with tsMuxerGUI first, you can take the disc out of your drive (prevents it overheating), and if the encoding fails you don't have to look for the disc first and re-rip it: the file is still on your drive. Overall, you save tme.

- MakeMKV does not convert PGS subtitles to SRT - the only way is to run them through an OCR or download subtitles from another website. So yet again, no subtitles for those movies with non-English parts.

- Not as much flexibility with the encoding as with RipBot264.

- It is all running in one application: if it crashes, you lose what you are doing. You have to start again. If Ripbot264 crashes, the queue is kept and you can pick up where you left off reasonably quickly.

- MakeMKV is primarily used for lossless backups. Like I said before, not everyone wants to have 30-50GB backups a time of their Blu-Ray content.

If you rush it by using a one program solution, the quality will be bad (unless it's a 1:1 copy), and you will have issues playing the content.

If you take your time to research, then copying becomes easy, and not so much of a bind. Quick, too. And the results are more perfect.

Re: A guide: converting Blu-Ray to MKV

I've tried many of the "free" offerings and even some of the paid ones. I've not had the spam or quality issues with ByteCopy or PavTube and I've had maybe 2 discs it couldn't copy in the 8 months I've been using it (converting about 5 discs a week on average). I guess if I wanted to invest the time and energy in using your method I might see some marginally better results, but I'd rather invest my time into watching movies, not converting them. I use digital HDMI pass through on the Hub and let my Onkyo receiver do all the audio encoding. My rips play flawlessly on my 7.1 system this way and I'm happy. As for the storage space, yes, 1:1 BD rips take up a lot of space, but with the Hub's 1gb and another 3gb on a Hitachi USB drive, I've yet to run out of space. I rarely save a movie after viewing it and if I do I often copy them to a BD disc with my burner. I'm sure your "system" works well, but for people like me who think time is money, software like PavTube's ByteCopy is a time and money saver.

Re: A guide: converting Blu-Ray to MKV

I've generally had good success with Handbrake, though it doesn't currently support Blu-ray subtitles directly. You have to export them with another tool and them import them, which is a bit of a pain.